This documentary which was featured at this year’s FESPACO(Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou)is about Hiplife music in Ghana, a combination of highlife and american hip hop.

Directed by Jesse Weaver Shipley, the film looks at this genre as a youth cultural movement that came about with the intersection of many musical influences, from indiginous music, to african american and afro-carribean music.

The film goes on to explain that interestingly enough, hiplife emmerged out of elite prep schools, because it was in these schools the the young people had access to hip hop through family members that traveled abroad.

The film follows Reggie Rockstone, one of the recognized originators.

It shows his progression from the early 90s until present.

He started out with an assumed Brooklyn accent over synthasized heavy beats, to eventually rhyming in Twi over beats that incorporate more local musical themes.

“It is really important to recognize the complex way that hiplife music shows us the movements around the Atlantic world. The ways in which influence doesn’t just go in one direction, but that African diasporic forms, musical form, religious forms, have this kind of trans-Atlantic movment. Hip hop is supposedly an African American and Afro-Caribbean form, but then people in Africa start to reincorporate this into African traditions. It points to the idea that origins are complicated,ar never singular. “ Jesse Shipley

Keep an eye out for this doc, which should be getting US distribution soon.